The numbering is based on that used in PPP (Bragantini, de Vos, Badoni, 1986. Pitture e Pavimenti di Pompei, Parte 3. Rome: ICCD), which splits the houses into two numbering groups.

We have also based our plans on that in PPP and have verified them against our photographs and made small updates to them. The three different levels of the house are colour coded so you can tell which level a room is on.The photographs have been room numbered in line with the plans and there is also an indication in the text of which of the three levels of the houses the rooms shown are on. They have also been enlarged.

We hope these are the most comprehensive plans generally available.If you know of any better plans we would love to hear from you.

We hope that teachers and students find the new web pages and plans useful.

Wednesday, 27 October 2010

An interesting new document (draft) has been posted by the Perseus project for comment: “Rome Wasn’t Digitized in a Day”: Building a Cyberinfrastructurefor Digital Classicists. I recommend the section on Classical Archaeology as there are a number of digital projects listed there to explore. There is also an interesting discussion on the resistance (and the reasons for that resistance) to accept digital projects as relevant in academic assessment, particularly in the case of tenure promotion.

Certainly the existence and mode of operation of Blogging Pompeii is relevant here. How does BP fit into this digital milieu?

Monday, 25 October 2010

I'm writing in hopes of finding someone who has a bit of information on multi-level plans of Pompeii, in this case Region 8 upon which I am conducting my research into shops. Due to Eschebach's plan of the city being intially based on aerial photographs, upper and lower storeys of properties can be difficult to track down as far as plans are concerned. Most later sources of plans that I have come across present only the ground level plan of a building despite the actual ruins presenting a different picture.

In order to be as accurate and wide-ranging in my research as possible, I'm looking to see if anyone knows of a source of plans for the following properties:

8.6.1,10,11 & 8.6.8,9 - the bakery complex of which 8.6.1,10,11 are on the upper level to the south and 8.6.8,9 are on the lower storey to the north, but still at street level, due to the natural incline of the insula's geography.

I was surprised to hear of this story about Castellamare di Stabia on BBC Radio 4 this morning. It's rare for a small town like this to feature on worldwide news, but you'll understand when you hear it's because mini-skirts are likely to be banned and wearing one will become a fine-able offense.

The announcement comes not long after this advert for free entry for women to museums when they are accompanied (story here on MiBAC), which has received a large amount of criticism from women.

In addition to celebrating the Vesuvian area as this blog does, these two events might cause us to remember the contributions of (unaccompanied, perhaps mini-skirt wearing) women to archaeology, as well as those of men, and that these should be equally valued.

Thursday, 14 October 2010

News of a conference being held today (sorry, didn't pick up on this earlier!) on flora conserved at Pompeii that are now extinct elsewhere in the Vesuvian National Park (thanks for building and dumping of rubbish):

Wednesday, 13 October 2010

This just in from artist Catrin Huber, who has recently been exploringthe Vesuvian sites and using their inspiration for her contemporary work.

Dear all,
You are warmly invited to

Kiosk of Fictional Space at Kiosk24 in Herford, Germany.

Catrin Huber imagines El Lissitzky and a painter from ancient Roman Pompeii meeting to discuss wall painting, exhibition design, and the merging of art & life. Visual results and documentation of this debate will be presented from 23rd October to 24th November at Kiosk24 as Kiosk of Fictional Space. The opening is on 23rd October at 11am. The setting-up of the exhibition begins on the 19th October and can be watched by the public.

Huber’s practice investigates representations of fictional and imagined architectural spaces within painting, drawing and wall painting. The dialogue between wall paintings, panel paintings and a given architecture is completed by the viewer through the act of looking. Kiosk24, a former window display, lends itself to this interchange as it emphasizes the relationship between inside and outside, private and public realm.

El Lissitzky created his ‘Kabinett der Abstrakten’ for the Provinzialmuseum in Hannover in 1927. Within this room, the thoughtful merging of visual, spatial and temporal experiences was crucial. His subject for the meeting with the Roman painter as imagined by Huber is the role of architecture and utopia in late capitalism.

The antique Roman wall paintings (in particular their architectonic style) submerge the viewer in a multifaceted play of seemingly open and closed walls, while emphasizing the given architecture.

The Roman painter meeting with El Lissitzky as imagined by Huber brings a wealth of possible interpretations re function and meaning of Roman wall painting to the discussion.

Catrin Huber is an artist living and working in London. In 2008, an Abbey Fellowship at the British School at Rome enabled her to deepen her relationship with ancient Roman painters and their work. An early artist residency in Moscow (1992) also allowed her to build a close friendship with the work of El Lissitzky. Huber has exhibited her work in Great Britain (e.g. Barbican Centre London, Satorial Contemporary Art London) and internationally (Akademie Schloss Solitude, Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe, RMIT Project Space Melbourne, British School at Rome). She has won numerous awards, residencies and scholarships from, among others, the DAAD, the Royal College of Art (John Crane Travel Award) and the County Baden-Württemberg (Cité Internationale des Arts Paris). Huber studied painting at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe and the Royal College of Art.

Tuesday, 12 October 2010

In early September 2010 I traveled to south England to visit Sally Grainger, Roman food historian and archaeologist, who had kindly invited me to see her own re-construction of a Roman cooking platform and oven.

You may be familiar with Sally's works The Classical Cookbook(with Andrew Dalby) and Cooking Apicius: Roman recipes for today. Both of these works required extensive research into the original Latin texts, which were then subjected to translation and finally the cooking expertise of trained chef Sally. Extensive research was also carried out in Pompeii and Herculaneum into the construction and use of cooking platforms and ovens prior to the building of one.

We decided that it might be useful to other researchers and those interested in the Roman world and Pompeii if we posted some pictures here of the construction and use of the cooking platform and oven. It was a very informative process for one who has seen the archaeological remains of these many times, but never actually seen a working platform and oven. We baked several loaves of natural yeast bread (sourdough) and a Roman recipe for a custard dessert. Judging by the results, while the technology is basic it is very much suited to the task.

Monday, 11 October 2010

Thanks to the hard work of Drew Baker with assistance from his colleagues Hembo Pagi and Gareth Beale, for which we are extremely pleased and grateful, we have now added extensive coverage of the whole of insula I.1, insula I.5 and insula VIII.7.

I.1.1 to I.1.10

I.5.1 to I.5.3

VIII.7.1 to VIII.7.15

VIII.7.16

VIII.7.20 to VIII.7.27

There have also been major updates to

VI.9.2 Casa del Meleagro or House of Meleager. This now has an interactive plan giving access to the page for each room separately.

VI.15.8 Casa del Principe di Napoli or House of the Prince of Naples.

VI.16.7 Casa degli Amorini Dorati or House of the Golden Cupids. This now has an interactive plan giving access to the page for each room separately.

The Porta Nocera tombs have been completely revised and renumbered with additional material in line with D'Ambrosio and De Caro, Un Impegno per Pompei, 1983. The north-west side now includes photographs of the body casts found in 1956-7. Our grateful thanks to Rick Bauer for providing these.

134 other pages have had smaller updates, with extra pictures, old photos, old paintings or Latin inscriptions added. The size of the pictures on all updated pages has been increased for better viewing.

While not strictly Pompeii related this may be of interest to some of you who like me are technologists.

"Digitizing Imperial Rome: A computerized Approach to the Architectural History of the Roman Imperial Forum"

Professor Emeritus James Packer, Northwestern University.
King's Anatomy Theatre Lecture Hall, King’s College London, The Strand, London. UK
29th of October 2010, commencing at 6 PM.
There will be a reception afterwards at the adjacent Old Anatomy Museum.

ABSTRACT
Although each year millions of people visit the Roman Forum - the center of Rome’s former remarkable empire - they find only one or two partially preserved structures and piles of architectural fragments. Most of the ancient buildings, apart from the few converted into churches, collapsed after centuries of neglect, leaving their remains to be quarried by later generations. The details of the individual buildings are still not widely understood, and the Forum has never been studied as a unified architectural composition. Moreover, owing to new archaeological studies and advances in computer technology in the last fifteen years, it is now possible both to reconstruct the Forum’s monuments accurately and, with these new reconstructions, to comprehend the design and meaning of the whole site. These considerations led my colleague, Professor and Architect Gilbert Gorski, and me to undertake our new, digitally based study of the Forum.

Our work clarifies the design of the buildings around the Forum’s central core. It collects, for the first time in English; the most important material related each of the major monuments and shows visually their structure, size and original appearance. Over a period of nearly forty years (29 B.C. - A.D. 10), Augustus rebuilt the site, and thereafter, in material, size structure and decoration, its buildings related clearly to one another. Together they impressively represented the power and prestige both of Augustus own regime and that of the Mediterranean Empire it governed.

With some missteps (the short-lived colossal equestrian state of Domitian, the unfortunately situated, enormous, gaudy Arch of Severus), later emperors carefully maintained Augustus’ design and structures, even as they rebuilt many of the monuments after disastrous fires. The late third century A.D. additions of Diocletian maintained this tradition but added a fashionable, new architectural framework that expressed that emperor’s optimistic hopes for the future of his recently reassembled Empire. Only the end of Rome as an imperial capital doomed the site to neglect, ruin, transformation and, from the 18th century on, to the investigations of modern excavators.

Lots of articles in the Italian press last week about the problems at Pompeii (and lots of mud-slinging, too) - and these have been picked up by the British press. This was in yesterday's Telegraph:

Pompeii 'a symbol of Italy's sloppiness'

For visitors to Pompeii, they are a guaranteed crowd pleaser: erotic frescoes, including one of Priapus, the god of fertility, adorning the walls of a 2,000 year old Roman villa.

Or rather they were until two years ago, when the House of the Vettii closed for a restoration project which was supposed to last a year but which still grinds on, the villa encased in scaffolding and a sign outside offering no indication of when it might reopen.

Pompeii may be the best preserved Roman city in the world, thanks to the volcanic ash from nearby Mt Vesuvius which smothered it after a catastrophic eruption in AD79, but critics say years of neglect and indifference have turned it into an international embarrassment and an emblem of the dysfunction which plagues so much of Italian public life.

Friday, 8 October 2010

We may have been working at Herculaneum since 2001 but the curse of "Herculaneum time" (where everything takes much longer than you could have ever expected) has meant that only now we can share our work via our website: www.herculaneum.org

The website is not perfect, but we preferred to get a compromise site published rather than fail to share our work and results with you all. You'll note that the site currently only works in Italian - sorry! The English version is being translated and will be online as soon as possible. Watch this space...

Wednesday, 6 October 2010

Interview in the Corriere della Sera with Mario Ardovino, who was named Superintendent of Pompeii in September but then had his name withdrawn (Jeanette Papadoupoulos has been appointed instead). He's not very happy about it ...

Tuesday, 5 October 2010

A busy day of news and questions today, and now capped off with the news that Jeanette Papadopulos has been confirmed as Soprintendente of Pompeii and Naples until the end of December. Read the full story in La Repubblica.

The Louvre is to a hold a conference called (more or less!) "From archaeological excavation to the museum" - the link to this blog is the paper being presented by Stefano De Caro (Director General of Antiquities) on the Campi Flegrei:

Here we have a small, conical stone imbedded in the pavement/sidewalk just west of the entrance to the property at 8.3.2 and next to steps leading to the elevated pavement/sidewalk leading to the comitium at 8.3.1.

I'd be very grateful for opinions on the object's identity as it is relatively small (the scale measure is in 1cm blocks) and it does appear to have some wear to the top of the object.

Any guesses?

Thanks!

*Apologies for the object being caught in the shade of the step. It is located on the lowest level in the corner before the first step.

For some time I have been working with plans published in Dobbins and Foss' The World of Pompeii. I'm sure that many of you will be familiar with their background and the knowledge that the plans are some of the most recent, accessible and computer-compatible published in many years.

I'm particularly concerned with the "Map 3, Plan of Pompeii. Regions, insulae, detailed building plans, tombs and street addresses". The scale is listed as 1:1000 and a scale bar is provided. But can anyone tell me if the scale unit is metres or feet? I would appreciate some confirmation, although I'm somewhat sure that scale is in metres (as the size seems more appropriate in metres and because this plan is based on one provided by the SAP, an Italian institution which I imagine will have made use of a metric unit system). But these are just guesses!

Friday, 1 October 2010

I have just had a very nice email from María Pérez in Spain. She writes:

I am a Spanish archaeologist who follows your blog about Pompei. I've just seen your post about the new article on Pompei in the Spanish edition of National Geographic and it has awaken my curiosity about which other articles have been published in Spanish about this subject. So, I've found some interesting things just typing "Pompeya" in the web dialnet.unirioja.es, which compiles all the more recent Spanish research articles and books on all subjects, including Humanities.

Below are the publications that Maria has compiled. I think you'll all agree how nice it was of Maria to share this with us - thank you, Maria!

I am absurdly happy to be able to post this link to an article about Pompeii in the Spanish edition of National Geographic magazine! Of course, you'll have to buy the magazine in Spain to read in ... Nevertheless, I'm not sure I've ever posted anything in Spanish before, so I hope this is the start of a new trend!